Parties (or hosts) that construct and maintain web sites on the World Wide Web (i.e., the Internet) generally wish to structure their web sites (the site) so as to accomplish certain goals with regards to the web site's visitors. Sometimes the goal may be to encourage a visitor to stay at the site for a maximum amount of time. Other times the goal may be to allow the visitor to quickly and easily access or purchase a certain amount of products, images or items. A tool that monitored visitor activity on a web site would benefit a web site host in that the host could modify the web site based on visitor activity to encourage visitors to access certain pages, hypertext items, images, and other objects, or to take other particular actions. Such encouragement could be accomplished through modifying the web site to make it more productive and more appealing. Such a tool that monitored visitor activity would also be beneficial for a wide range of other purposes.
Currently, however, such a tool for monitoring visitor activity does not exist. Tools presently used for monitoring visitor activities result in partial records (or visitor activity logs) that may have numerous and, sometimes large, gaps in information regarding user behavior. Such gaps or incomplete information in visitor activity logs, for example, are often created through a visitor's use of browsers that store documents and do not reload such documents every time a visitor requests it, a web site's use of frame based templates and the use of proxies on the Internet by servers to avoid delays and reduce network traffic. Numerous other “short-cuts” or “time savers” cause the actual data recovered regarding visitor behavior to differ from the true visitor activity. This situation is further complicated by issues like multiple document downloads from the server for every user request (e.g., for framesets or popups). The recent advancement of Internet technologies, like the widespread adoption of dynamic HTML (i.e., DHTML) and the wide spread use of active components in the web pages (e.g., scripts, forms and embedded objects like applets and flash objects) have further widened the chasm between the user experience and the visitor activity log recorded at the web server. Moreover, other methods used to record visitor experience while interacting with a web site such as listeners and web bugs are either cumbersome to implement or intrusive on the visitors and hence are not practical means of recording user experiences. Even if these methods are implemented, for the above mentioned reasons, they are generally still ineffective and have difficulty in exactly capturing the visitors full interaction with the site. Consequently, a method is needed that takes available information and reconstructs a visitor's experience in a manner that is useful to the web site's host and accurate within an acceptable margin of error.